Letters pour in from desperate readers (or would if they did) saying, “Fred,
explain America today. Say something tendentious and irritating about what
is going on in this curious country. Why do we do what we do? Sock it to us.”
All right.
The United States is an uneasy, frightened country, yet aggressive, truculent,
and looking for trouble—which it finds. Fear: Terrorists are everywhere,
like cockroaches and governmental cameras. Citizens should watch each other
on the subway and rat out suspicious behavior, such as speaking a language
other than English. People need to go through metal detectors in county courthouses,
because the government is scared of them, and get spied on by the government
to protect them against the ever-present danger of…of, well, the unspeakable
and unspoken angst of existence. And so, in the customary manner of large
scared bullies, the country lashes out, at Iraq, Iran, Syria, North Korea,
Afghanistan, Venezuela, wherever.
A friend says, “Fred, gringos want to be controlled. They
love this police-state stuff. It gives them meaning. They lead miserable
lives in boring suburbs. The husband is a mouth-breathing oaf with his retinas
sewed to the football machine. His wife is a pucker-faced shrew with cellulite
like the dark side of the Moon and his kids are whining dopers who gawp at
the box and gurgle over stupid video games. The guy has no control over anything
in his life. He’s scared of the boss and the pissed-off middle-aged
man-hating divorcee with thick ankles in Human Resources who would love to
outsource his job to Mumbai. He knows he’ll get raped if he splits from
the wife. So he wants to kill something. He doesn’t care what, and anyway
finding out might require reading a book, which god knows he isn’t going
to do.”
This may be harsh. It also may be true of more people than one would like.
The United States does not look real happy just now. It is a lower-middle-class
country with an upper-middle-class income, except the credit cards are maxed
out and people are in debt up to their gills. They don’t read much.
The cultural center of gravity is the black ghetto with its irremediable anger.
Americans tend to equate social class with income, but Archie Bunker in a
call-me-Arnold SUV is still Archie Bunker. And his job, no matter how air-conditioned
the office, is probably as rewarding as screwing lug-nuts on cars passing
on the assembly line.
It is a purely consumer society. There is not much to life out there except
buying things. Granted, a medieval serf would have regarded this as a problem
much to be desired, but it leads to a certain bleakness today. You don’t
buy a house because you love it, because of the lush vegetation thereabout
and ancient trees and an enchanting air of calm and antiquity. No. You buy
a “starter house” with the intention of unloading it when you
make partner. Then you buy a shoddy McMansion, exactly like three hundred
others surrounding it. Then it’s home theater and granite counter-tops
and more-complex iPods and, just maybe, one day, a Hummer, that most thunderous
of motorized codpieces. A suspicion dawns that something somehow isn’t
right. Yep.
Other uneases brood over the landscape. Women dominate domestic politics
and so we have the Fear State. With them security security security trumps
liberty or taking chances of any sort, and so we must ban pocket knives. They
are afraid of guns, want kids to wear helmets on bikes, and think tag is a
violent and dangerous game. Yes, there are exceptions, but fewer day by day.
We must fill in the deep ends of swimming pools and fear second-hand smoke
and things that go bump in the night. I suspect a lot of this vague anxiety
stems from the lack of a settled and satisfying place in society.
Men run foreign policy, and do it with the ardor and brainless territoriality
of retarded pit bulls. We must confront The Threat—this threat, that
threat, any threat in a storm. After the Soviets punked out on us, we adopted
Terr, Terrace, and Tersm as interim threats until China comes online. We must
Fight, we must Show Them, we must Draw the Line. All across America men with
grade-school minds and beachball paunches growl that we gotta gettem before
they get us, if we don’t stoppem there, they’ll land on the beaches
of Peoria.
Women are limited creatures. They couldn’t be this stupid if you wired
the entire sex in series.
Anyhow, this division of irresponsibility leads to contradictions. In school,
low-IQ teachers try to make little boys into girls and expel them if they
play soldier and say Bang. Then the Pentagon recruits these transvestite artifacts
and sends them off to shoot people they’ve barely heard of. What a plan.
What clarity of vision. What consistency.
A thing about society now is that nobody knows the rules any longer, if there
are rules. In the past, from about the lower middle class and up, women behaved
as ladies and men as gentlemen, concepts now identified with oppression. Even
the lower classes were usually courteous after their fashion. The arrangement
had its uses. When general agreement enforces consideration of others, life
is better. You can go for days without wanting to strangle anybody.
Today, many people are civil, but many aren’t. You don’t know
what to expect. Do you respond to abuse by being abusive in return? Or get
walked over? That is the question. We now have Road Rage. In the streets you
find people pushing onto the subway like piglets looking to suckle, and throwing
the finger. Women are worse, apparently confusing ill-bred pugnacity with
virility. (Men are careful how they treat each other, as there are consequences.
Women do not suffer consequences. It must be nice.)
Further, the ghetto rules everywhere, seeps in, or threatens. Americans are
not social climbers, but social descenders, rappelling deliberately into the
grubby depths. On the radio one hears regularly such lyrical confections as
“Muthahfucka, muthafucka, she a ho, shit.” Ah, but the chief rule
of discourse today is that one must never offend the offensive. You must never
suggest that they straighten up and mind their manners, mouth, grammar, and
work ethic.
The pervasive overregulation adds to the national edginess. The government
decides what and whether your children will learn in school, and makes it
nearly impossible to flee. Getting on an airplane requires a strip-search
by federal dimwits. You can’t hire people without proving that you have
enough of this race and that sex and don’t discriminate against left-handed
Pomeranian sadomasochists with Hispanic grandmothers. Rules, laws, regulations,
paperwork. A sense arises of being trapped. Many hate it.
Add it up. A frightened people over-controlled, having no communal roots,
blocked by government from raising their children as they see fit, parlously
indebted, sexually confused, and lacking a sense of permanence or of a connection
with the natural world, both of which have since time immemorial mitigated
a certain emptiness in human affairs. Like a dog tormented by evil children,
the country is ready to bite. And it does.
I hope that was adequately irritating. I can do no worse.
"Constantly useful. You can mash bugs with it." Field
& Stream
